REPORT #275 May 2000
ARE ENGLISH TEACHERS IN HIGH SCHOOLS, AND COLLEGES OF BELIZE DOING
THEIR JOB? WHAT IS THEIR JOB?

Produced by the Belize
Development Trust

Belize has a very poor reading capability in the 288 schools in rural
areas. Lower grades of elementary school are not learning to read, for a
variety of reasons. With six districts and a whole lot or rural schools
out there in the boondocks, the problems facing the teaching of English,
writing, reading and comprehension are formidable. How do we muster the
human resources available to tackle this major nationwide problem?

Are English Teachers with Bachelor's, Master's and Phd's really doing
the job they should in Belize? In the rural schools, often a teacher
does not even have a High School Certificate. How can they be expected
to tackle the fundamental problems of teaching the reading of English
without assistance, from higher educated experts in Belize?

Teachers at higher educational institutions, teach their classes,
collect their salaries and serve on a committee or two. But shouldn't
their function in an agricultural rural country like Belize be more
involved? Is it always the fault of an absentee Education Department in
Belmopan, or some religious schools manager who hardly ever visits the
schools for which he manages the salary disbursements?

How do these under educated rural school teachers get the needed help,
support and enthusiasm to tackle these big tasks, which are obviously
failing from the statistics? Shouldn't it be coming from our better
educated teachers in higher institutions of education? Who will run some
workshops for rural teachers? Who will do internet searches seeking new
ways to improve teaching of the English language and reading abilities
and present same results to the rural teachers? Who will increase the
tempo and frequency of training and assistance programs for lower
education teachers? Shouldn't it be these same higher Educational
English teaching experts? Which of these teachers will actually go to
difficult to reach, rural primary schools and help rural elementary
school teachers with little or no equipment, or education to do the job?
Are our degree'd people in higher institutions really contributing more
than the basic salary function? Aren't their jobs more than teaching a
class at the institution where they work?

Recently, the hooorah about centralizing education in Belmopan with a
bigger bureaucracy was a real step backward in education, including
reading problems. Even uneducated fisherman from the cayes like me
understand that a more flatter horizontal bureaucracy in education is the
better way to get cost efficiencies and higher performance results, than
the proposed fiefdom building bureaucratic hiearcheal model being
proposed. That stuff went out with the Dodo and the collapse of Russian
communism! The proposals heard on the coconut telegraph for a bigger
educational bureaucracy, have to be the brain child of some amateur
elected political representative. One couldn't think for a moment, that
a Phd in Education in the Education Department would be so stupid as to
push such an idea. We know the bureaucratic mind wants to forever
increase the size of their departments, the number of employees and so
forth. This is a well understood and documented phenomena of human
nature from way back in the Greek and Roman Empire days. Not to say,
some countries like Russia made the same fundamental mistakes. But with
the rapid increase in performance studies and other news on such
phenomena, it is well understood nowadays, that centralized bureaucratic
models that grow bigger are extremely costly, wasteful of financial
resources and so inefficient as to be laughable. It is just that
fundamental facet of human nature to build your power base at work here.
Not practicalities and results orientated thinking. More flatter, less
chain of command and more autonomous horizontal models are the obvious
way to go. Yet the talk of a larger education bureaucracy leaves this
fisherman scratching his head in wonder? Are they really that stupid in
Belmopan? Belize is in America, it is definitely not France, or England,
shouldn't those factors be considered? Why copycat something silly?
Leadership quality is sorely lacking here if the coconut telegraph is
true.